On learning, leadership, and impact: a new kind of dialogue to tackle the challenges that threaten our societies

Leadership, Writing

The Geneva Learning Foundation’s new Dialogue is an invitation-only global conversation exploring learning, leadership, and impact. Our aim is to explore new ways to connect individuals who are tackling the challenges that threaten our societies. In the past, one observation has been that conversations around learning and leadership tend to happen between nearly-identical peers. One of the bets we are making is that to progress our understanding on leadership, diversity is a necessary condition. And, indeed, I am struck by the radical diversity of the Dialogue’s participants so far. My conviction is that such improbable connections could create new possibilities for facilitated dialogue to surface new insights into the nature of leadership in the Digital Age. Below are three examples, connecting a disease control student from Ghana, an engineer working on a water pipeline in Libya, and an NGO worker from New Zealand.

Learning, leadership, and impact in the Digital Age: In dialogue with Karen Watkins

Leadership, Writing

Listen in on the Foundation’s first invitation-only Clubhouse chat. Karen Watkins and I chatted about the Foundation’s unique approach to this triptych of learning, leadership, and impact in the Digital Age. We shared some of the insights we gained about resilience during the first year of COVID-19, learning from the Foundation’s immunization programme that connected thousands of health professionals during the early days of the pandemic. It was informal in ways intended to provoke incidental learning. No stilted panel, rigid agenda, or dull slides. And, most important, we opened up the dialogue to include real-world challenges, successes, and lessons learned that were shared before the chat by invitees. Those we discussed include: Children adapting to digital learning in Lebanon during the COVID-19 period with involvement of girls actually increasing because of the use of digital technology. How to deal with resistance against peer-supported learning in pyramid organizational hierarchy. Bringing a …

Efteling gold fish. Personal collection.

Why learning professionals should strive to be leaders, not just service providers

#DigitalScholar, Leadership

The learning landscape is changing fast. Even the most jurassic face-to-face trainers I know are now embracing the digital transformation or at least trying to. Ephemeral fads such as the Social Age or gamification are proliferating alongside newer, more sustainable and productive approaches that match the learning contexts of humanitarians and support the development of their capabilities in a volatile world. Everyone in workplace learning – save a few proverbial ostriches going the way of the dodo bird – is trying to learn the new skills needed to operate in new ways to do new things. This is like a dream come true. But rethinking our roles, I believe, is going to be far more important than learning to run a webinar. Are we service providers? Are we a support service (like HR, security, and finance)? Who are really our clients, when those who pay are seldom those who learn? …

Catherine Russ

On the future of leadership

Leadership

A guest blog post by Catherine Russ We recognise this is an era of radical and disruptive change in every facet of society. We wrestle with our tried and tested ways of working in the past so that they stay relevant in an increasingly complex present. Where we seek passion and purpose, work remains, more often than not, stress and drudgery. And that is consistent wherever people are on the pyramid. Technology has seeped into every realm of our work – and we struggle there, too, with the fear that it will overwhelm, dehumanise, or even replace us. We observe that the power of hierarchy is diminishing. The structures in our organisations are being challenged to radically reshape. Yet we know that failure rates in change programmes are high. In a vast and growing network of alliances, partnerships and consortia, we find ourselves compelled into new and collaborative models and …